"It's often said that elephants are the most human of animals - there's something comical about their acquiescence, and tragic also. The long elephant poem - I was trying to write from the point of view of someone who had been seduced by the logic of his punishers and who, in a kind of awful way, could reproduce the very logic that had put him in this predicament in the first place. And maybe, in some kind of minor way, that's something I feel about myself, or maybe about all selves, that they fall in love with the thing that oppresses them."

You may also like:

• 

  David Lehman
  Poet

• 

  Frank Bidart
  Academic

• 

  Frederick Seidel
  Poet

• 

  John Ashbery
  Poet

• 

  Jorie Graham
  Poet

• 

  Patricia Lockwood
  Poet

• 

  Rae Armantrout
  Poet

• 

  Ron Silliman
  Poet

• 

  Stephen Burt
  Poet